Observable Notebooks Data Loaders • Hacker News Board

Re: Observable Notebooks Data Loaders

#21

Post by phailhaus » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 3:36 AM UTC

m-schuetz wrote: post #17

elAhmo wrote: post #11

Is anyone using Observable for something? In theory sounds good, I like the demos, but never actually saw anyone actually using it. We use Marimo notebooks as a great improvement over Jupyter.

I would have liked to, but I found D3 to be an unintelligible mess and the reverse evaluation of observable notebooks to be counterintuitive, given I do litterally anything else from top to bottom. I like notebooks and I wish there was a proper JS alternative to Jupyter, but this isn't it for me.

You can just write your observable notebook from top to bottom if you want. The reactive cells just means that you don't have to, and it will still work.

Re: Observable Notebooks Data Loaders

#22

Post by some_guy_nobel » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 3:44 AM UTC

elAhmo wrote: post #11

Is anyone using Observable for something? In theory sounds good, I like the demos, but never actually saw anyone actually using it. We use Marimo notebooks as a great improvement over Jupyter.

My team at uses Observable Framework for building dashboards. (I don't know who'd be the core customer of Observable Notebooks enough to pay, tbh).

Re: Observable Notebooks Data Loaders

#23

Post by thomastjeffery » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

dwmbt wrote: post #19

thomastjeffery wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CLI works great for... what? Isn't the idea to write notes? I think constantly running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane. Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI?

have you taken a look at what the CLI is for? like you mentioned, it's pretty much just a build step! but there are some runtime things basked that are interesting [0]. i just have a watcher listening to file changes to trigger a rebuild. i have no need for real-time queries so just having the current state at build works for my purposes. if you must know, the product i work on is primarily a data lake. we have our o…

I guess my point was that I don't really want my first interaction with a thing I'm casually curious about to be me building a custom web app on top of it. By making their GUI app Apple-only, they have lost my casual interest. I'm not sure what they gained by making that compromise.